


A Game He Can't Win

by ExtollerofTrolls (Fullmetalpon3)



Category: Everhood
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, But especially not him, Gen, Green's not okay, I don't really understand this game but I really like it, Mental Breakdown, Mental Instability, Mild Gore, Orange is here briefly, Self-Harm, Transformation, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, but he's also not quite sane, green's kinda ooc, no one's okay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-16
Updated: 2021-03-16
Packaged: 2021-03-25 10:28:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,818
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30087726
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fullmetalpon3/pseuds/ExtollerofTrolls
Summary: Green’s hysteria drives him to perform increasingly depraved acts.Purple and Brown are powerless to stop him.
Relationships: Green Mage & Purple Mage, brown mage and purple mage, green mage & brown mage
Comments: 4
Kudos: 9





	A Game He Can't Win

**Author's Note:**

> It took Green Mage a while to accept the loss of his humanity.  
> Contains self-harm, alcoholism, and other unhealthy coping mechanisms.

_The last time I spoke to Green, he told me he doesn’t know how to satisfy his boredom when he’s already had eons to enjoy all the pleasures the physical world has to offer. That was weeks ago, and I have not seen him since._

_I’m worried he might do something drastic._

_Please, come and help me find him._

_~Brown_

_…_

Green’s house was easy enough to get open. A skeleton key did the job easily enough. Finding Green was easy, too.

He was lying on the floor and reeked of alcohol, both from the open bottles of liquor and from the pools of vomit around him. It did not seem as though he had eaten anything else recently.

Purple suppressed her annoyance, as she always did, and hooked her arm around Green’s right side, gesturing for Brown to do the same. Together, they dragged him away from the rank liquids. “You know, from your note, I’d assumed he’d disappeared. Not tested to see if liver damage can somehow overcome immortality.”

“I did look for him!” Brown protested, gently settling Green in his nearby messy and unkempt bed, before opening all the windows to the small house. “He wasn’t here. I swear.”

Purple did not reply, looking over Green’s living quarters. It was a nice enough house but dreadfully dirty and neglected.

A groan broke her out of her stupor and back to Green. He opened his eyes, then immediately shut them tight again, pulling the comforter over his head. “Go away,” he murmured.

“Green!” Brown said, far too loudly, eliciting another groan. “Where have you been?”

“Go away.”

Purple slammed the door to the house, causing the form under the blanket to tense up in pain. “I would prefer to stay until we get some answers, Green.”

Green did not reply.

“Drink some water. It will make you feel better,” Brown suggested. He fetched a glass from the sink. Green still refused to move, so Brown pulled the curtains over the windows. “No more light, Green. Get up.”

Slowly, he pulled the cover down, staring at them both with dull gray eyes. “I don’t remember inviting either of you,” he stated, venom in his words.

“We came because we were worried,” Brown said.

“I came because he was worried,” Purple clarified.

Green winced and put a hand up to his head. After a few moments, he said, “Why? It’s not like I’m going to die.”

One of Brown’s eyes twitched. “You call this,” he gestured at the bottles on the ground, “living? When was the last time you ate? And drink your water.”

Green seemed as though he was trying to fix a glare on him, but his eyes weren’t focused very well, so it was far from intimidating. “What are you, my mom? Get out. I’m allowed to be miserable.”

Purple vaguely heard Brown start up an argument, but a book in the corner of the room had caught her attention. It was a last in the line of nearly identical unmarked volumes, but while the others were covered in dust, this was seemed as though it had been moved recently. She picked it up and opened it.

“What is this?” she asked, interrupting the rant that Brown was mercilessly unleashing upon the hungover Green. She held up the book for them to see. Inside were pages upon pages, filled with nothing but hashmarks.

Green immediately turned even paler, and Brown stood up hurriedly to take it from her. He turned back to Green. “This is why you’re upset? You’re getting worked up over nothing!”

Despite his shaky stance and pounding head, Green made his way over to them with surprising quickness. He batted the book out of Brown’s hands. “It’s not nothing.” There was anger in Green’s eyes but something else.

Purple knew what it was. “What are you afraid of, Green?”

“Get out!”

Purple obliged, pulling Brown with her. As her friend protested, trying to get back in even as Green shut the door and locked it behind them, she shook her head. “Leave him be. He’ll come around eventually. He’s too social to stay in there forever.”

…

“It’s a strange thing,” Orange said, scratching his mustache. “Gundrall’s been my assistant for so long. I can’t imagine why only now he’s been stealing my tools. I also can’t figure out why someone so stupid has actually been able to take them without me noticing.”

“Hmm.” Purple was paying more attention than her reaction let on. She couldn’t care less what Orange did in his lab, but she did want to know who was stealing operating equipment. And poorly maintained equipment at that. “I’m sure it will turn up.”

“Yes, well, thank you for taking the time to search with me, anyway,” Orange said. “It’s not a great loss, but troubling, nonetheless.”

“Of course.”

Purple trudged back through the swamp, looking for something she had not mentioned to Orange. She was following a set of tracks, barely noticeable, due to the mushrooms constantly running back and forth to play hide-and-seek. But she knew what she was looking for. A feeling of well-controlled concern came over her when red marks of blood began to accompany those tracks. Eventually, she stopped inside a clearing.

“Come out, Green,” she said. “I know you’re here.”

No answer. Purple scanned the clearing. “Why did you steal Orange’s medical instruments, Green? Is something wrong? Brown hasn’t said anything to me.” Her eyes landed on a scrap of a green utility jacket caught on some of the prickers. Ah.

Purple reached in and grabbed him from the bushes. He tumbled into the dirt, bandages falling out of his pockets. Before he could recover, Purple wrenched the bloodied scalpel from his hands. She regarded it a moment with cold eyes. “Why are you hurting yourself?”

Green stood up and took on a defensive stance, like he was expecting her to hit him. “I’m not.”

She gestured to his hands. They were so covered in blood it was hard to originate the source of his injury. “That looks self-inflicted to me.”

Green glowered up at her. He wasn’t exactly short, but Purple had always been abnormally tall. She remembered being in high school, many millennia ago, and her teachers encouraging her to join a woman’s basketball league. So long ago, she’d nearly forgotten.

“What I do is my business.” He made a grab for the scalpel, and she easily held it away.

“Have you been drinking again?” she asked. It was true he was unsteady on his feet and pale, but it wasn’t so much drunken stupor on his face as overwhelming anxiety.

He gritted his teeth. “No. It doesn’t mean anything anymore.”

“… Let me bandage your hands.”

A look of animalistic terror, like a deer caught in the headlights of a car. “What?”

“You could get an infection. Also, you might pass out if you lose any more blood, which wouldn’t be a problem if you were eating enough. I can tell you aren’t.”

He immediately put his hands behind his back and started stumbling backwards. “No!”

“Let me help you, Green,” the slightest touch of aggression in her voice.

A tree root impeded Green’s attempts to escape her, and he felt to the ground. “Stay away from me!”

Purple did not acknowledge his protests and began to kneel to grab his arm, sure that he would not be able to put up much of a fight with how bony and malnourished he was.

“I said STAY AWAY!”

A flash overtook her vision, and she had no time to move as a ribbon of light hit her directly in the chest. It hurt quite a bit, and she fell over, scalpel flying from her hand as she did so. Green’s bloodied hand grabbed it. She looked up at him.

A glow surrounded him, whirling around before dissipating into the air. Her face gave no indication of her shock. She had seen these powers before, but only from creatures native to this realm, not a human. “Green…” she said, reaching for him.

“I-I’m sorry, Purple,” he said. “This place is doing it to me!” He broke into a run out of the clearing.

Purple recovered after a few more minutes. She sat up, clutching her stomach, and slowly made her way back to the forest door. While her walk was solemn and steady, her mind raced with thoughts.

Green had come into possession of the strange powers of this place. It was surprising, but she rationalized that it was not wholly impossible. They eagerly accepted immortality; did that entail other changes? Over time, would she succumb to the same fate?

She examined her own hands. Same as they always looked: rich brown, long and flexible. Not anything like Green’s hands.

No. Because as Green had grabbed the scalpel, she had seen why he had tried to maim himself.

On Green’s hands, his middle and ring fingers had started to fuse.

…

“Why do you keep doing this to yourself, Green?” Brown asked, carefully affixing cotton swabs to the side of his head. Green had lost an ear. Brown tried to rid his house of sharp implements, not that it mattered. Green had torn it off with his own nails.

“Because I want to win,” Green answered, immediately and with a strange sort of suppressed glee.

“Win?”

“Don’t you see what’s happening to me?” Green asked, rocking his head back and forth, a smile on his face. He held up his hands. The skin was scaly and purple, and the middle digits had almost fully fused together. “’The only constant in life is change’. We don’t grow old here, but everything must change. Even with immortality.” He sounded out each syllable of the word like a child. He looked back and forth with wide gray eyes. Brown followed his gaze but saw nothing. Green leaned back in and whispered. “But if I get rid of it first, it can’t. That’s how I win. By destroying my body before it gets to it.”

Brown was not oblivious to the effects this world had on them. He had noticed how his own teeth were changing shape ever so slightly, and his hair was growing unnaturally thick. Purple kept much of her body covered now, but she seemed to move with unnatural smoothness now, and no footfalls could be heard from her.

Green was hit the worst by far, though. The purple scales continued to creep up his arms, century after century, and his eyes glowed unnaturally in the dark.

“I think it’s my fault,” Green said. Brown stopped. He almost sounded… sad? “I asked for this. The harder I fight this place, the more it tries to make me a part of it. It’s not as though I can leave, either. If I just accepted it, I’m sure I’d find peace.”

He perked up. “But now it’s the principle of the thing. I always hated quitters, so it would be hypocritical of me to back down now! My arms, though… It won those. I’ll let it keep them.”

Brown could get upset with Green. He could try to beg him to seek help. He could try to shake some sense into. He could scream angry words until he was red in the face. He could lock him in a padded room so he wouldn’t hurt himself. But ultimately, it was pointless. While the rest of them had come to terms with the meaninglessness of time, Green couldn’t seem to let go of it. Brown had thrown out all his journals, but somehow Green always had a number for the years they’d been there. Brown couldn’t figure out how he was keeping track.

He finished securing the bandage to Green’s head and looked him over. A twinge of pain went through Brown’s heart. More of Green was bandaged than not. “Green, I don’t suppose that I could convince you to stop hurting yourself for me, could I?”

Green shook his head. “I’m sorry, Brown. It’s not that I want to cause you discomfort, or that I don’t appreciate your sympathy, but as I said, I can’t stop now.”

“I figured as much.”

Green grabbed his hand in his peculiar grasp. “Don’t sound so sad. I told you I had already entertained my physical body to its limits. But that begs the question… can you entertain something non-physical?”

…

_Green is missing again, and I found something you need to see._

_~Brown_

Purple followed Brown into Green’s house, getting a vague sense of deja-vu as she did so. She brushed it off.

Brown walked to a corner of the main room and moved aside a rug. Underneath was a hatch. She raised an eyebrow. “I’m assuming you didn’t know this was here the last time he disappeared?”

“It wasn’t,” Brown insisted. “I remember him building this house. There was no basement.”

“What’s in it?” She threw open the hatch. A rickety wooden ladder led down into the darkness. She summoned a glowing purple orb in her hand to cast some light. It went down about twelve feet, before becoming a corridor that led further off. She gently floated down, Brown following behind her on the ladder.

Examining the walls, she noted the same hashmarks as Green had previously kept in his journals covering every square inch of space, excluding the floors. “I can guess what these represent.” She noted how far the hallway stretched ahead of them. “It’s been longer than I thought.”

Brown looked down the corridor. “I kept walking and walking, but it just didn’t end. I assume he’s back there, but I didn’t want to go alone.”

“That’s probably for the best,” Purple agreed. “We don’t know what state he’s in.”

Brown was already forging ahead when Purple put a hand on his shoulder to stop him. “Wait.” A faint odor had reached her nose, becoming more pungent the longer she stayed. It was a bad smell. The smell of rotting flesh. “Where do you suppose that’s coming from?”

Her stouter friend realized what she meant after a moment. “I… don’t know.” He looked back and forth. On their left, the only thing differentiating the walls from the endless corridor stretch ahead was a large alcove. Brown moved into it and examined the corners. “These aren’t sealed. There’s something behind here. There must be a switch or a trigger.”

“There wouldn’t be,” Purple said. “He knows you or I would find it.” She placed her hand against the wall. It wasn’t open now, but that didn’t matter. It only mattered that it had been at one point. Even Green could not find a way around that.

The wall was gone, and a dark yawning cave was before them. She moved inside without a moment’s hesitation.

She saw a lamp and turned it on, ignoring its overly cheerful greetings, and instead looking over the horrific sight that greeted her eyes.

Every part of the human anatomy was scattered across the room, blood decorating the distasteful display, with one exception. There were no arms. She heard Brown retch behind her, but her focus was already pulled away.

“Green,” she stated. It wasn’t a question. She knew he was here.

On the floor, a dirty nest of cloaks quaked slightly, and something purple poked out. Green’s hand.

“Oh… you found my little secret base,” Green’s voice came from the cloak.

Brown looked around in horror. “Green… what did you do?”

Green seemed to be feeling around for something. Finally, the elongated fingers wrapped around a large crystal orb and pulled it back inside the fabric.

“Immortality persists,” Purple said. She looked down at the pieces of cracked skull on the ground. “How long has it been since you destroyed your brain?”

“Hmmmmmmm…” Green droned, drawing out the sound. “I don’t know. I have trouble keeping track of time these days. That’s what the marks are for. You saw my marks, didn’t you?”

A look of realization came onto Brown’s face. “Green, you can’t have seriously done this to yourself for the sake of ‘winning’?”

The purple hands reached out again, this time for a ratty old wizard’s hat laying on a nearby workbench. It was handmade clearly by someone with little talent for sewing. “No. For the sake of ending it. It was never a game. I made it up to feel like I had some measure of control. Of course, I didn’t. I was just too bored and scared. Not like you two.”

The hands positioned the orb on top of the cloak and placed the hat over top of that. “But now, I really don’t have anything to fear. There’s nothing left of me to change.” The cloak floated up, orb peeking through a tiny space between hat and cloak. Green looked over his former body, lying across the floor. “I feel better than I have in a long time.”


End file.
